Highlight Real: Finding Honesty & Recovery Beyond the Filtered Life

By Emily Lynn Paulson

A music prodigy, head of her class, and well-liked in school, Emily Paulson decided early that embellishment paved the road to success. As she grew up, she figured out how to make the picture look even better - with a successful husband, five beautiful children, and all the required accompanying accoutrements.

Then along came social media,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Launch Pad Publishing
• Release date: Sep 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733853279

Emily Lynn Paulson

EMILY LYNN PAULSON is a writer, Certified Professional Recovery Coach, TEDx Speaker and the Founder of Sober Mom Squad. She has discussed how to end the shame and stigma of mental health and substance use disorders on and in The Doctors, Parade, Today Parents, The Seattle Times and USA Today as well as on the websites Bustle and The Huffington Post. Sober since January 2, 2017, Emily's recovery path is focused on ruthless honesty, grace and self-love and she believes that sharing our truth with each other is the best resource of all. Paulson resides in Seattle with her husband and their five children. A contributor to The Addiction Diaries: Stories of Darkness, Hope and All That Falls In Between, you can find Emily on Instagram @highlightrealrecovery and on the web at www.highlightreallife.com.

Book preview

Introduction

I open my eyes and immediately wish I hadn’t. I can tell by the stark, fluorescent lights above me that I am in a hospital. I don’t even need to remember what I’ve done to know I’ve made another bad decision. Then again, my life over the last few years has begun to feel like a series of bad decisions. The only problem is that there is an audience watching me, all shaking their heads along the way.

As the voices around me become more distinct, the details begin to emerge: the party, the fight with my husband, the text message saying goodbye, the bottle of pills.

But perhaps more than any bad decision, I remember the feeling, the voices in my head that said, They’d be better off without you.

They being the audience. My blood, my loves, my husband, Kale, and our five children, who are right now at home with the nanny, being told only that mommy is in the hospital, not that she put herself there.

I come to and begin to wretch. Kale rushes in, and the look on his face once again makes me wish I hadn’t woken up.

It isn’t a look of anger or frustration. It isn’t even pity. It is love.

And I’m just not sure I deserve it. I don’t think I ever have.

I turn my head and can’t help but think what people would say if they saw us like this: Me lying in a hospital bed, my husband hovering over me crying because I have once again thrown our lives into disarray.

The picture we present to people is so perfectly put together; not a hair is out of place. We show them our highlight reel, but we never show them this: our highlight real.

And it is killing us both.

Highlight Real is my story, but as I have come to realize, once I started making good decisions, once I started saving my life, that it is many women’s stories.

We live in the picture of the best of us, but we fail to heal our worst.

We fail to heal the traumas that make us, like me, open up a bottle of pills and think Kale and the kids would be better off without me.

We fail to heal the addictions and behaviors and fears that drive us into living lives that aren’t really ours.

And for those of us who are married, we fail to heal the big gaping wounds we brought into our marriages, and we’re surprised to find that, over time, they have gotten infected. We get sick and we stay sick. As long as the picture looks good, we think we can ignore the illnesses lying just below the surface until, one day, they erupt in the most unimaginable ways.

Most of us have been taught that if we just ignore a problem, it will go away. But that’s not how trauma works. That’s not how it gets healed.

It is estimated that the human brain has 100 billion neurons, and each of these neurons connects to approximately 1000 other neural networks. The brain fires off over 20 million billion (yes, million billion) calculations per second. If we were to lay out each neuron, we would have approximately 2 million miles of network.

The problem is when someone has experienced trauma, those neural pathways become distorted because trauma breaks the normal processing.

Studies of the brains of human and animal subjects who have been victims of traumatic stress reveal differences in their brains when compared to those who have not. These changes in brain structure and physiology can affect our memory, our ability to learn, and the way we regulate our emotional reactions, social development, and even our moral growth.

The brain is triggered into an intricate flight-or-fight dance in order to protect itself, and we begin to develop maladaptive ways to manage life.

We’re not able to exert rational control over things that other people can: things like alcohol, temptation, or our own feelings.

This is why we can never escape unhealed trauma. It drives our behaviors and, of course, our bad decisions.

We end up living in a state of short-term survival: what do I need right now to make me feel better, to make me feel safe?

Unfortunately, when you’re working from a trauma state, what makes you feel safe rarely provides true safety. That which is beneficial for short-term survival is not necessarily good for long-term health.

Instead, the thing we use for short-term satisfaction—the drink, the cake (or the lack of cake), the flirty text, or the fight with our spouse—ends up bringing us only more dissatisfaction.

It brings us more pain and ultimately causes more trauma, ensuring that the cycle continues… until we end up in a hospital bed, or on the edge of divorce, or simply looking at ourselves in the mirror and wondering who we have become.

I wish I could say that night at the hospital was my wake-up call, but at least I can say it was part of it. It helped me to begin opening the door to change even though the door was heavy, and I was pretty tired by the time I got there.

But once I pushed through, I found something on the other side I would have never anticipated. I found the glorious little miracle that is healing.

I discovered that I didn’t have to be defined or guided by my trauma. For many years, I had lived in undefined brokenness, never able to articulate my pain, terrified others would know about it, even as I drowned in its sorrow.

When I finally started to do the work of getting better, I realized that I had to start sharing the broken parts in order to heal.

But first, I had to get real.

Some say that human development, including behavior, is biologically guided. Thankfully, we can take that biology back.

We can begin to connect to something bigger than ourselves and realize that once we are able to get out of ourselves, we start healing from within.

We stop living the role we were assigned and, instead, create our own roles—in our families, at work, in community—that are the best expressions of ourselves.

I will never forget that look on my husband’s face, even if I couldn’t handle it at the time. He loved that broken women even in her brokenness. He offered me the love I needed to start showing myself.

I didn’t have to judge her or be angry with her, and the world was certainly not better without her.

I just had to look at her the same way Kale did. I had to love her, even the broken parts. In fact, I had to love the broken parts the most.

I had to stop hiding her, thinking if no one knew, she would cease to exist.

I had to share my story, my brokenness. I had to share it not just for me, but so others could heal too.

Once we bring our traumas out to light, once we see how other people can love us through it, we can start to love ourselves a little more.

As Cheryl Strayed once wrote, The reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

According to most modern neurobiology, the best way to heal a broken neuron is to show it how someone else has healed. Neurons can mirror other neurons, and they can rewire so that when we have a hard day, that glass of wine, piece of cake, or fight with our spouse no longer looks like the answer. It looks like a short-term solution that is not necessarily good for our long-term health.

Instead, we are able to reach out to our community and get real with one another.

We’re able to show each other what it’s like to wake up in a hospital bed and know you just made the worst decision of your life, yet, still, people are going to love you.

Then we’re able to get up and be led out of the trauma and into the healing.

We are able to bring that healing into our homes.

We are able to share the highlights, but also the real.

Chapter One: Little Big Lies

I watched as the sun flitted through the sprinklers, a rainstorm of sunlight spreading across our backyard. As I lay in the grass, water arched above my head, spraying up into a perfect Montana summer sky. I wished I could be as perfect as that big sky above me.

But I knew I wasn’t.

I was eight years old, and I could already tell something was wrong with me.

The thing was, from the outside, everything looked pretty perfect.

We lived in a happy, quiet neighborhood with ranch homes and green lawns and ice cream trucks circling every afternoon during summer days, just like that one under the sprinklers.

My parents met when my mom was only 17, and my dad was 22, set up by their own mothers. My father had already fought in Vietnam when he came back to the States and married my mother in a church in Vegas where he had grown up. By that point, both of their own parents had gotten divorced, and since they were the youngest children in their families, my parents were pretty much on their own.

In so many ways, newlyweds are like pioneers, heading off for unknown territories together, determined to build new lives that might somehow be better than the ones they came from. My parents were no different. After stopping in Helena, Montana on a long road trip for my dad’s job, they decided it would be a great place to raise kids, so they moved there right after they married.

We lived there in a three-bedroom home with a green lawn and that lone sprinkler, spraying above my head.

Emmy?! my mom called from the house, but I closed my eyes and pretended not to hear her.

Come in, Em. It’s time to practice!

My parents never pushed me into music. It was just something I happened to be naturally good at, playing the flute the way other people might score in soccer or pick up another language with ease.

Music was my other language, and by the time I was eight, I was already known as a prodigy.

I finally stood up in the backyard, shaking the grass off my Debbie Gibson Electric Youth t-shirt, and headed back into the house to pick up my flute, leaving the magic of our backyard sprinkler behind.

The next day, I would tell everyone that my parents had bought us a Slip-n-Slide, immediately exaggerating our little sprinkler system into something people might envy.

I never understood why I lied. The words would just slip out of my mouth, and by the time they did, it was too late. I would have to own the lie, even if I wished I had never uttered it in the first place.

Psychologists say that pathological lying in children is usually attributed to one of three things: low self-esteem, anxiety, or depression.

Though I didn’t understand why, I struggled with all three of those things. Though I had long been praised for being pretty and smart and other kids liked me, though I acted happy and sweet most days, it felt like something inside of me just didn’t work right.

I don’t know if it was because my family was so isolated in Montana. We were states away from my grandparents who I wouldn’t meet for many years. In fact, it wasn’t until I was 10 years old that I met my mom’s mother; I didn’t meet my father’s mother until I was 19. I never met either grandfather.

Or maybe it was the way I thought my parents favored me over my older brother. I didn’t trust any of it, making me think there was something wrong with all of us. My brother was two years older than me. He paved the way, making mistakes that I became determined, even at a young age, not to repeat.

Or maybe it was just me.

Regardless, by the time I was in elementary school, I was issuing lies that made no sense. Whether it was telling my teacher I had finished my homework when I hadn’t or telling the kids at school I had spent the weekend in New York when I’d done no such thing, I lied without really thinking about it.

I was deemed gifted by whatever standards were appropriate for a five-year old child at that time and placed into first grade instead of kindergarten, making me well over a year younger than my peers. I was terrified, overwhelmed by the longer days and being separated from my mother. To compensate, I realized that if I lied about being richer, stronger, or more fun—whatever the situation called for—somehow the fear didn’t take hold. Lies kept my fear at bay.

Many years later, I would learn the term, Fake it till you make it.

I had to laugh. I had been faking it my whole life.

Later, I realized the lies were there not just to make myself look bigger or better than I was, but to hide who I really was.

We have a horse too, I said. I was in a small circle of girls at school.

Nicole cocked her head. She owned several horses. You do? she asked.

We were in second grade, and most of my classmates had been to my house where there was no evidence of a barn or any animal bigger than a cat.

Mmmm hmm, I replied nonchalantly, knowing that the vaguer I was, the less people would ask questions. He looks like yours.

The girls all nodded, and I smiled proudly. I ride him almost every day.

The bell rang, and we ran back into school. I was proud of myself until I sat down at my desk. It always happened like that. When I would first tell the lie, I would be flooded with pride, like I had just won something, but then, after a few minutes, I would feel terrible guilt. I didn't understand why I would do it. Looking back, a part of me is still confused by it.

I would even tell lies about my musical